Playing Mind Games

Today's meandering started when I came across this tidbit from the Washington Post--
Is Every Memory Worth Keeping? (washingtonpost.com)(free registration may be required)--about the use of propranolol to treat post-traumatic-stress-disorder. Apparently taking this drug after a stressful event, minimizes the impact of the memory and makes it easier to forget. It sounds like a laudable pursuit when you read about the nightmares and flashbacks suffered by people with PTSD, but can we trust ourselves to pursue this only for "good and pure" purposes?

Then I came across an article, 'We Can Implant Entirely False Memories', which discusses how easily and repeatably scientists can manipulate situations to plan false memories.

So on the one hand, we have science able to erase strong memories and the other to replace them with false memories...hmm. Add to this the comments of Philip Zimbardo, emeritus professor, Stanford, in
The New York Times > Science > God (or Not), Physics and, of Course, Love: Scientists Take a Leap and you have a really disturbing picture. If you studied psychology in the late 70's you might recall Zimbardo's famous Stanford Prison Experiment which he had to cut short because in the midst of it the students role-playing the guards were turning into animals and those playing prisoners were completely freaked out. Here's what he had to say about the guards at Abu Ghraib:

I believe that the prison guards at the Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq, who worked the night shift in Tier 1A, where prisoners were physically and psychologically abused, had surrendered their free will and personal responsibility during these episodes of mayhem.

But I could not prove it in a court of law. These eight Army reservists were trapped in a unique situation in which the behavioral context came to dominate individual dispositions, values and morality to such an extent that they were transformed into mindless actors alienated from their normal sense of personal accountability for their actions - at that time and place.

The "group mind" that developed among these soldiers was created by a set of known social psychological conditions, some of which are nicely featured in Golding's "Lord of the Flies." The same processes that I witnessed in my Stanford Prison Experiment were clearly operating in that remote place: deindividuation, dehumanization, boredom, groupthink, role-playing, rule control and more.

So eventually, we'll be able to get someone to torture someone else, erase that memory and replace with another.

Lord help us!